A general trend within the manufacturing community and in particular the aerospace industry is that the requirements on the manufacturing of components are subjected to ever tighter tolerances and surface integrity restrictions. In order to fulfil these requirements a lot of effort has been carried out to non destructive testing of the produced part. However, the final objective in the first place must be to assure a robust process. One way to achieve a robust process is to continuously monitor it. This may require additional sensors which increase complexity and adds cost. This paper presents suggestions and experimentally achieved results into the extended use of already existing sensors in the machine tool. The basic idea is to show how these sensors can provide additional information about the machine tool itself and how they can be used for monitoring the process as well as to support maintenance activities. The Poincaré analysis method is applied to the position encoder signals to reveal the underlying dynamics when the machine tool structure is excited with a periodically varying load.